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The Extant Troubadour Melodies: Transcriptions and Essays for Performers and Scholars byHendrik van der Werf; Gerald A. BondReview by: Margaret SwittenJournal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 381-388Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/831535 .

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- REVIEWS -

Hendrik van der Werf. The Extant Troubadour Melodies: Transcriptions and Essays for Performers and Scholars. Gerald A. Bond, text editor. Rochester, N.Y.: Published by the author, 1984. viii, 83, 379* PP.

THAT THE TRANSCRIBING OF TROUBADOUR MELODIES IS A SERIOUS BUSINESS was

dramatically demonstrated at the turn of the century, when a now legendary clash between Jean Beck (Die Melodien der Troubadours, 1908) and Pierre Aubry (Cent motets du Xllle sizcle, 1908) over who had first discovered the modal theory brought about, or so the story goes, the death of Aubry. The atmosphere of acrimony thus established has persisted: since then, the field has not lacked colorful confrontations between philologists and musicologists of different persuasions. The main cause for confrontation is the paucity of firm knowledge about troubadour music and of reliable evidence from which to derive such knowledge (the poetry being somewhat better situated). Of the more than 2,500 poems that have survived, only some 250-75 have music. Of the thirty or so manuscripts that have preserved troubadour poems, only four-usually lettered G, R, W, and X1--contain a significant number of melodies, and transcription of them is often problematic. The field is thus fraught with uncertainty and inhospitable to the insecure. The need to study it is compelling, however, because the troubadours were the first self- conscious group of poet-composers in a Western vernacular tradition, inaugurating a new era in the history of European music as well as establishing the major themes and forms of European lyric poetry.

Precisely because The Extant Troubadour Melodies accurately presents most of the available evidence concerning troubadour music, it is a welcome addition to troubadour studies. There are other complete editions of the troubadour corpus. The best known is Friedrich Gennrich's Der musikalische Nachlass der Troubadours (three volumes, 1958-65), which furnishes an enormous amount of important information and, from that standpoint, has not been replaced. But regularization of the melodies and transcription in modal rhythm diminish the edition's value as an indicator of what the sources actually contain. The most recent collection of troubadour melodies has been made by Ismael Fernandez de la Cuesta, Las cangons dels trobadors (i979). This edition takes over much of Gennrich's material but presents all versions of each melody in nonmensural notation, utilizing medieval note forms above the staff. This would be splendid if de la Cuesta's edition were not marred by an incredible number of errors in transcription and by a presentation of texts that can only be termed absurd; thus it is, for all scholarly purposes, useless.

G: Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, R 71 sup.; R: Paris, Bibliothbque Nationale, fr. 22543; W: Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, fr. 844 (trouvere lettering, M); X: Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, fr. 20050 (trouvere lettering, U).



382 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Despite the existence of other editions, then, van der Werf's book meets a real need.

Those already familiar with his earlier publication, The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvires (1972), know that the greatest potential for controversy in van der Werf's work arises from his treatment of rhythm. This, in fact, from the start, was the issue that most divided the field. By the middle of our century, several groups could be discerned among specialists: advocates of the theory that troubadour melodies must have been sung in the meters of the rhythmic modes (Beck-Aubry, Gennrich); skeptics such as Sesini, who espoused in his edition of G a kind of nonmensural system that allots equal time to each poetic syllable;2 and opponents of the modal theory, mostly philologists such as Carl Appel, who rejected the imposition of regular meters on a verse system defined by the number of syllables rather than by accents. Carl Appel's edition of the songs of Bernart de Ventadorn,3 had it not been delayed and disrupted by the First World War, would have been a model of how these songs should be edited: multiple melody versions accurately reflecting the manuscript sources are combined with precise and sensitive analyses of subtle poetic rhythms. The crux of the matter, of course, is that the notation of troubadour melodies gives, of itself, no indication of note values, of duration. In addition, the use of nonmensural notation in troubadour manuscripts long after mensural notation was available suggests that medieval performers of this repertory might have neither sought nor used regular metric accents. Indeed, those who followed the modal theory often came out with radically different interpretations of the same song, provoking, as time went on, fundamental doubts about the validity of their principles.

So it was, at a moment when the modal theory was suffering from inextricable internal contradictions, although not from a lack of dedicated practitioners, that van der Werf emerged in the early seventies as a clear advocate of nonmensural transcriptions of secular song. Although, curiously enough, his conclusions largely agree with Carl Appel's, his approach is different. Van der Werf does not argue primarily from the presence or absence of metric accents in notation or texts, although he recognizes the syllabic nature of Romance poetry; he argues from a close study of manuscript traditions and a careful comparison of melodic variants. He presents directly the evidence from the sources and prides himself on not applying to the sources previously elaborated theories. This makes his work fresh and lively and permits him to raise intriguing questions. Initially, van der Werf's main energies were devoted to the trouv ire repertory; emphasis now on the troubadours as distinct from the trouveres is a welcome extension of his earlier efforts.4

2 Ugo Sesini, "Le melodie trobadoriche nel canzoniere provenzale della Biblioteca Ambro- siana (R 71 sup.)," Studi medievali, n.s., XII (i939), i-roi; XIII (1940), 1-107; XIV (1941), 31- 105; XV (1942), I89-9o, plus 24 pp. of facsimiles. (Repr. as a book, Turin, 1942.)

3Carl Appel, Bernart von Ventadorn, seine Lieder (Halle, 1915); idem, Die Singweisen Bernarts von Ventadorn nach den Handschriften mitgeteilt (Halle, 1934).

4 In van der Werfs view, his publications on the troubadours and trouvres---The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouveres (Utrecht, 1972); Trouveres Melodien, 2 vols. (Kassel, 1977-79); and this volume-are intended to complement one another: "The earliest one is the introduction



REVIEWS 383

The primary focus of his edition is a comparative analysis of troubadour melodies, in multiple versions where such exist. Despite its title, the book does not contain all melodies normally included in the troubadour repertory. It contains some 245 melodies (48 of them in more than one version), with assorted contrafacts from other repertories. The songs edited here were selected by criteria that included not only their language but also "the time of origin, the poetic content, the strophic form, the monophonic state of the music, and the attribution. This approach secured inclusion of almost all Old Occitan poems preserved with music and attributed to a known troubadour. It excluded only songs which are much better treated in studies devoted to other genres or to other periods" (p. 23).5 Unfortunately, owing to the circumstances of its publication, the edition gives only first stanzas of poems, a feature van der Werf himself is the first to deplore (p. 78), with no translations. This somewhat limits its usefulness. But van der Werf includes for each song references to the main textual and musical editions and to photographic reproductions of manuscript sources. A check of manuscripts leads to the conclusion that his transcriptions are reliable, while the accompanying commentary is informative.6 The texts are presented simply as they occur in the musical manuscripts.7 One could wish that in the

without which the later ones may be difficult to understand. The later ones contain the evidence for the conclusions reached in the first one" (p. vii).

s One could argue that van der Werf's definitions of genre and understanding of "poetic content" tend to be simplistic and that he pays too little attention to the questions of whether or not a troubadour actually composed the melody accompanying his text in a manuscript, or of how multiple attribution might affect this question.

6 The following are disagreements between my readings and van der Werf's; excluded are the cases where disagreements are caused by a faulty state of the manuscript sources that is explained in his commentary. P-C 9, I 3a, R, 6, i: d not b; a very pale d, from which the black ink has almost disappeared. P-C 70, 24, W, 6, 7: should be a notaplicata. P-C 70, 3 i, W, 6, 6: read "i ai mes," not "jai mes," thus giving the line the correct number of syllables; the music scribe had difficulty aligning syllables and notes, so some adjustment has to be made here, just as for the other manuscripts detailed in the commentary. P-C 155, 21, G, 3, 1o: I read E-D-E-C here, as for 2, io, and 8, io, rather than E-D-E-D-C. On pp. 133-34*, the song is P-C 167, 34, rather than P-C 167, 37; no. 37 follows on p. 135. P-C 248, 61, R, 2, 1: I would read F, although the placement of the note on the staff is ambiguous. P-C 248, 69, R, 9, 3: the last d is very faded, if it is there at all; the commentary on this song could be clarified by reference to Frank's Ripertoire (see n. 3 below), and van der Werf seems bewildered by the play of inner rhyme, the play of repeated small melodic units, and the interplay of both. P-C 262, 2, syllable count, top line, p. 215*, is 8 not io. P-C 293, 30, R, 7, 7': neumes linked here are separated in the manuscript. The remark on p. 226* about stems for 7, i, applies to 7, 7', also. P-C 364, 1 , G, i, i: probably E- D-E-F rather than E-D-E-C; for I, 2, there seems no compelling reason to change "pauc" to "pac." P-C 392, 9: on p. 291*, the rhyme scheme is incorrectly noted without indication of feminine rhymes; R, 3, 8: second note probably C, not D, placed higher than usual to avoid the text. P-C 406, 14, R, 5, 3: e rather thanf. P-C 406, 21, references on p. 320*: the song in Maillard's anthology is P-C 406, 20, "Selh que no." P-C 406, 28, R, 5, 7: the last neume looks more likef-e-d-c thanf-e-d. P-C 406, 31, R, 3, 8: I1 read G rather than F. P-C 406, 36, R, 2, 7: I read c-b rather than b, the upper note being hard to see because it runs into the text.

7 There are a few emendations in the textual commentary that seem neither entirely necessary nor justified. It would be preferable not to attempt emendation of the texts but to give a straight diplomatic edition, since the texts in the music manuscripts present numerous linguistic problems--e.g., the frenchified Old Provenral in W and X--which are intriguing pieces of evidence.




formatting, song and commentary had always been rigorously aligned (for problems, see pp. 78*, 103*, I15*, 125*, 156*, 202/200*, and 221/222*). The most inconvenient (to this reviewer) feature of the edition derives, ironically enough, from its very purpose: consistent transposition of melodies from different sources so as to bring all versions to the same pitch level in order to facilitate comparison of multiple versions. Such transposition seems unnecessary; it would be preferable to preserve a medieval record as close to the original as possible. But this does not affect the accuracy of the transcriptions, and the songs are wisely presented following the alphabetical order of the main troubadour reference tool, Pillet-Carstens Bibliographie,8 the P-C numbers serving as an easy reference mechanism.

The edition proper is preceded by three essays: (i) "Dissemination and Preservation"; (2) "The Melodies"; and (3) "Text and Music." The essays are filled with factual observations, drawn directly from the sources and supporting the principles of the transcriptions. For the most part, they do not present material entirely new to readers of van der Werf's other writings, doubtless because this work is intended to support and be supported by them. The essays chiefly serve to point out perplexities of the troubadour tradition.

The first of these is one of the thorniest problems bedeviling specialists of the repertory: what processes of dissemination and preservation have brought troubadour songs from their day to ours? We do not know how the medieval chansonniers came into existence. The earliest ones we have date from the mid-thirteenth century. By that time, the troubadour lyric was ceasing to be cultivated in southern France due, primarily, to the Albigensian crusade. Troubadour song, thus, flourished during a period (roughly Iloo- I250) from which we have no manuscript witnesses. Further, relatively few chansonniers (only one with music, R) came from southern France. The rest were compiled in foreign parts, notably Italy and northern France. How, then, did the songs gain entry into chansonniers in a remote geographical location, sometimes as much as I50 years after they were composed? Were they transmitted orally or in writing? In his first essay, van der Werf argues for a complex combination of both oral and written dissemination. His position is sensible. He examines each stage of the transmission process, making distinctions between the author/composer, performer, notator, scribe, editor, and collector, pointing out the few troubadour references to a manner of dissemination and scrutinizing the inner organization of the chansonniers as well as the textual and melodic variants.

The presentation is generally rich and rigorous, yet on occasion its reasoning makes one pause. For example, the statement that most stanzas other than the first "can go in almost any order" (p. 5) is intended, with some qualification, to support the idea of oral transmission. But one can discern concepts of composition among the troubadours, based on a firm opening stanza followed by a nondirectional scattering, that make of variations in later stanzas as legitimate a reflection of written as of oral dissemination. And one must not forget the number of songs whose versification sets a rigid stanza

8 Alfred Pillet and Henry Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours (Halle, 1933).



REVIEWS 385

order unvarying through twenty or more manuscripts. Or again, when speaking of collectors' tastes, van der Werf suggests that one reason why written troubadour texts are far more numerous than written melodies- which contrasts with the more abundant musical materials in the trouvere tradition-may well be that "music readers were more numerous among French than among Occitan speaking people" (p. i i). But so far as we can judge, only a few troubadour manuscripts were compiled for "Occitan speaking people" in the strict sense (something like six out of thirty chansonniers, including only one with music). The large proportion of troubadour manuscripts coming from Italy is a fact of considerable interest, because very early on poetry and music separated in Italy, the musical element of lyric poetry being absorbed, so to speak, into the words. Did the Italian emphasis on texts and lack of a strong poet-composer tradition in monophonic songs make the writing down and preservation of music less attractive to Italian collectors? Can this help to explain why so many troubadour manuscripts have texts only-and not even any space for melodies? Most will agree with van der Werf's conclusion that the "precise history of a song's transmission and preservation is undoubtedly beyond recovery" (p. 1i); but they may not wish to place the emphasis he does on performance, which leads him to define a manuscript version as "a mixture of a performer's rendition and a scribe's interpretation thereof" (p. i i)-even though in many cases this may well be an accurate description.

Notation and manuscripts furnish another set of problems for van der Werfs introductory essays. The brief treatment of notation reaffirms positions he has adopted elsewhere.9 Description of the four music manuscripts is also brief. Van der Werf (pp. i6 and 20) believes G and R were each the work of a single music scribe (several hands have usually been posited for R); he compares the erratic and tentative beginning of R with chansonniers whose contents were likely planned in advance (p. 17); he characterizes rapidly the troubadour sections of the trouvere manuscripts W and X (pp. 20-2 3); and then concludes with a relatively lengthy discussion of the special case of the thirteenth-century figure Guiraut Riquier. Fifty of his songs are contained in R (forty-eight with melodies), grouped and dated as though gathered into a book by the troubadour himself; yet van der Werf, unlike many other scholars, does not believe that Guiraut's poems and melodies in R were copied from such a book (p. 28). While the discussion is useful, a more thorough review of the material would have been welcome. One of the most pressing needs in current troubadour studies is a sophisticated, comparative analysis of the four main music manuscripts, which should include comments about specific notational characteristics, scribal habits, possible manuscript interrelations from a musical standpoint, and the peculiar position of the chansonniers with music in the entire troubadour tradition. Doubtless for reasons of space, such a need could not be met in van der Werfs introductory essay. The more is the pity, for the information contained therein does much to whet the appetite for further discussion of such crucial issues.

See The Chansons, pp. 35-45; and The Emergence of Gregorian Chant: A Comparative Study of Ambrosian, Roman, and Gregorian Chant, I (Rochester, N.Y., 1983), 22-42.




To take up Chapter 2 of the essays, "The Melodies," is to confront a further series of perplexities surrounding (i) melodic analysis, (2) scribal errors and corrections, and (3) chromatic alterations. At the outset, after asserting that we do not yet have the analytic tools for satisfactory compre- hension of troubadour melodic style, van der Werf proposes to single out "various melodic characteristics, and determine how they occur in troubadour songs in comparison to the trouvere repertory and Gregorian chant" (p. 29). This is, indeed, the proper path (and one could well add other monophonic repertories), but, within the constraints of his introduction, van der Werf cannot take us very far down the road. After some succinct remarks about range, intervals, and repetitions, he refers the reader to his previous works, The Chansons (pp. 46-59) and Gregorian Chant (pp. 43-49 and 58-98), where ideas on underlying structure, initially inspired by Curt Sachs's The Wellsprings of Music (196 i), receive more ample development.

The section on scribal errors and corrections--deletions, additions, era- sures, and other puzzles-concerns the difficulties that are familiar to all who till the field. How, indeed, did our scribes work? In R there are several examples of additions to the texts apparently made after the music scribe had written the melodies. Were such additions made by the music scribe himself because he found an insufficient number of syllables for his melodies (p. 36)? If this was the case, why did the music scribe(s) pass over so many other such errors, correcting only a few? And what does this all mean for the relationship between music and text scribes in R? Do our current notions about division of labor between text and music scribes need revision?'0 Manuscript G has its share of anomalies, and opinions differ concerning the reliability of its music scribe, whom van der Werf considers an expert (p. 16) but whose practices can sometimes be very enigmatic.

Often enigmatic, too, are the chromatic alterations in the troubadour manuscripts. How long is a sign of alteration valid? Here, as in The Chansons (p. 84), van der Werf inclines to honor them until the end of a staff (pp. 39- 40). What do we make of abrupt chromatic alterations (pp. 42-43)? Were flat signs sometimes added by someone other than the main music scribe (p. 39)? Why do the troubadour manuscripts G and R have relatively fewer signs of alteration than do the trouv re manuscripts W and X or trouv ire manuscripts in general (p. 40)? Were there fluctuations in performance (such as between b-flat and b-natural), so that scribes (if they were notating from aural recollection) sometimes made arbitrary decisions? "One scribe may have written b-natural where another one chose b-flat. It is even possible that a given scribe, when faced with this problem in recurrent passages, opted for b-natural in one statement but for b-flat in another" (p. 45). This would not be unlike a text scribe's attempt to notate disparate sounds of the emerging vernaculars with the alphabet at his disposal and no fixed spelling rules, so that his matching of sound to letter was not always consistent. A phenome- non that van der Werf does not address explicitly is the question of "transposition," as it were, by clef. When, in notating the same melody, one

1o Some of these questions are raised by Elizabeth Aubrey in her dissertation "A Study of the Origins, History, and Notation of the Troubadour Chansonnier Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, f. fr. 22543" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Maryland, 1982), pp. 125-26.



REVIEWS 387 scribe uses an F clef and another a C clef, both on the same line of the staff, the two versions of the melody will differ, and there is frequently no effort made to duplicate mode or interval structure by the use of chromatic alterations.1' What perception of notated versus sung pitches does this habit reflect? Does it mean that some music scribes copied written exemplars with the single aim of getting the notes on their staves but without thought of the sounds the notes represented? All in all, much more research is needed to support general conclusions about chromatic alterations in troubadour manuscripts. Van der Werf furnishes, to close this section, a fourteen-page list of such alterations together with comments that raise all the pertinent questions; included in the list, curiously enough, are the alterations he himself added to the melodies that he transposed.

When we turn to the third introductory essay, "Text and Music," we discover, not unexpectedly, that our troubles are not over. But here it would seem that the perplexities arise as much from the focus adopted as from the materials themselves. Van der Werf's main argument in a section on syllable count is that this was a more flexible element in medieval performance than is generally acknowledged (p. 63). The plica may indeed represent such flexibility (pp. 65-66). A list of hypo- and hypermetric verses in the music manuscripts reminds us of the familiar presence in all troubadour manuscripts of a sizable number of variations in syllable count. Are they legitimate performance variations or merely scribal errors? In most edited texts, syllable count is normalized. By raising the question of performance, van der Werf rightly objects to such normalization-already questioned by philologists in the wake of Paul Zumtl:or's elaboration of his now celebrated concept of mouvance (the medieval text was not a fixed entity, but "moved" through a constant interplay of variants, modifications, and revisions).12 Yet to focus exclusively upon the deviations from what van der Werf calls-without defining it-"the prevailing syllable count" is somehow to set a crucial question backward. Among the central features of troubadour song are the development of syllabic verse as a new principle of prosody, the organization of such verses into stanzas, and the influence of such stanzas on the development of a corresponding musical syntax. Moreover, van der Werf makes no reference to the most important source of information about syllable count and versification in troubadour poetry: Istvain Frank's Riper- toire. If the demythologization is stimulating, and that aspect of van der Werfs work should not be underestimated, yet the mind boggles at the thought of preparing a book like this without utilizing Frank's RNpertoire or without even drawing the Ripertoire to the attention of the reader."3

As he takes up strophic form, van der Werf does not, as he had in The Chansons, explicitly undervalue the formal sophistication of the melodies; neither does he seem fully to have come to terms with the nature of such sophistication. The problem seems to arise from his notion of form and of

1 See ibid., p. 191. 12 Paul Zumthor, Essai depoitique midi6vale (Paris, 1972), p. 507- " Istvain Frank, Ripertoire mitrique de la poisie des troubadours, 2 vols., Bibliotheque de l'Ecole

des hautes etudes, 302 and 308 (Paris, 1953-57). An Introduction to Old Provengal Versiication by Frank M. Chambers will be published by the American Philosophical Society in 1986.




how words and music together can create formal structures. The central relation for him is to be found in "a parallel between repetition of rhymes and recurrence of melody verses" (p. 67). The enigma of these melodies, for him, is that "the troubadours were able to repeat melody verses in such a way that a song's melodic form was as intricate as its rhyme scheme," yet they usually "chose not to do so" (p. 7'). While it is important (and traditional) to compare musical phrases and rhymes, it is a mistake to stop there. It is especially a mistake to hanker after rigorous coordination between these two elements, because that is not how the troubadours achieved the vast and fascinating array of varied formal combinations that is their legacy to us. Theirs was an experimental art. To appreciate their formal experiments, it is necessary to explore a range of techniques of repetition, melodic and textual. Small repeated melodic units are slippery objects to grasp, but they can take on a structural function both contrasting with and complementing the recurrence of entire phrases. Brief melodic repetitions shape through-composed melodies more often than might initially be supposed. The poetry behaves differently. Although rhyme and rhetorical devices engage repeated textual units in numerous transformations, the major troubadour genres contain almost no repetition of entire verses, and repetition never structures a text in the same manner that it structures a melody. Formal complexity in the troubadour lyric comes, therefore, not from a stiff parallel between two elements but from myriad repetitions, juxtapositions, and iprerweavings of inherently different musical and textual units, playing over the framework of a basic correspondence between a line of verse, punctuated by rhyme, and a melodic phrase.'4

After a brief review of the few troubadour contrafacts for which both model and contrafact are preserved with music (among the most interesting of which is Jaufre Rudel's "Lanquan li jorn," Walter von der Vogelweide's Palaitinalied, and an anonymous Latin song, discussed on pp. 73-75), van der Werf concludes the introductory essays with a series of judicious and pertinent remarks on "Performing and Editing Troubadour Songs" (pp. 75- 82). He clearly distinguishes the two functions, pointing out pitfalls and responsibilities in each endeavor. All the relevant problems are reviewed, including choices of text, adjustment of melodies where necessary, "authen- ticity," instrumental accompaniment, and voice quality. He then summa- rizes the principles he has followed in making his own edition (pp. 8 1-82) and expresses the hope that performers as well as scholars may benefit from it.

In sum, this book underlines, without necessarily attempting to resolve them, the important questions posed by close examination of original troubadour sources and is to be commended for accurate presentation of the material in those sources.

MARGARET SWITTEN Mount Holyoke College

14 I have addressed some of these questions in The Cansos of Raimon de Miraval: A Study of Poems and Melodies, Medieval Academy Books, 93 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985). Also see Aubrey, "A Study," pp. i5o ff.

